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Food and Drink

Dropping 70 pounds this past year has dramatically changed my life in ways I could never imagine.

Several years ago someone told me; “you don’t know what you don’t know”. That statement could not be more true in my battle with being grossly overweight. The first thing I wish I had understood about dropping weight long before now was the fact that there is no getting around the hard work. Short term hard work simply won’t get it done — it takes a long, committed work ethic to see real success. Suddenly takes far longer than you think.

I constantly looked for ways to avoid the hard work with starvation, not pushing myself to exercise and rationalizing poor eating.

Without discipline, hard work and forcing my body to shut up and buy into the systematic torture of change — I remained chronically fat. Almost everybody hates reality and the incredibly stark truth that self-indulgence gets revealed in the mirror, in clogged arteries and back pain from carrying around a huge sack of blubber belted to my body.

I tried hiding the extra me under black clothing, big coats, stylish sport coats and dressy sweatpants. If I couldn’t be beautiful I tried being invisible — blending into the fashionably fat masses of hot dog swallowing suburbanites. While on the inside I was in a constant state of panic hoping that 280 pounds marked the end of my willful self-destruction. Maybe that was the magic number of my rock bottom. Maybe wearing XXL shirts was the dead end that would trigger a sudden turn around towards self-improvement.

Choosing to make everything worse seemed like the only way I could finally reconcile myself to the idea of getting better. I was playing out the hopeless feeling I continually held inside. It’s difficult to tell now when looking back — but what I do know is that I was willing to put my life at risk to remain a weapon of mass consumption. I was eating myself alive and slowly moving my way towards annihilation. I was hell bent on destroying the one person I could not stand the most in life. Myself.

“When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.” — Chuck Palahniuk

In retrospect it felt like I was helpless to prevent the chaos of self-destruction watching myself eat myself into oblivion. If you don’t grab the wheel who is going to stop you? We live in a culture that celebrates and cheers on excess. I had to take control of the culture living inside myself, not the one outside of me. I could not control the culture outside myself — so I aimed all my might towards the one I could control.

The art of elimination is a deliberate choice. To succeed you must be intentional about how you consume in every part of daily life — not just at the dinner table.

Before I got my eating habits under control I began to take a hard look at how I was consuming in my own relationships by trying to get my needs met and desires fulfilled no matter what. I realized that starting was the most difficult part of my entire journey. My life depended on taking that first step of committing to change.